


about ethan

by zhuzhubi



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Dad!Reid, Discussion of Abortion, F/M, Fluff, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Reid as a dad, Single Parents, the baby was Reid's au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:42:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25252552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zhuzhubi/pseuds/zhuzhubi
Summary: cat’s baby was spencer’s.(or, reid x reader bond over babies and mutual trauma)
Relationships: Spencer Reid/Original Female Character(s), Spencer Reid/Reader
Comments: 10
Kudos: 83





	about ethan

**Author's Note:**

> also on tumblr at zhuzhubii

_It was the most complicated birth I had ever nursed. Not medically - medically everything went perfectly - but circumstantially. First, the mother was handcuffed to the delivery bed and guarded by several armed SWAT agents. Dr. Lim - the OB - said nothing about the fact that the mother was under heavy guard, and she - due to the location of our hospital - had delivered the babies of a few incarcerated women before. Normally she fought very hard to chase the guards - who were usually only regular officers - out of the room, citing that a woman in labor is clearly in no condition to elope or attack._

_The fact that she said nothing meant she had been briefed on that woman’s situation, and she was particularly dangerous for whatever reason. After it all, I asked around to see if anyone knew who exactly she was - her name was redacted on all the medical files, so I couldn’t look her up. It appeared her identity was “need to know,” and Dr. Lim never let anything slip._

_Second, there was a screen placed over her similar to the ones used during a c-section so that she could not see the baby once it was born. I thought this measure to be a little extreme, but the blonde FBI agent who oversaw the whole ordeal insisted upon it. I never learned her name either, but the mother clearly recognized her and continually snarled insults in her direction, yelling about a man named “Spencie,” who I ascertained to be the father._

_Once the baby - a boy - was born and the cord cut, I was charged with immediately removing him from the room - with strict orders to ignore the woman begging to see her baby. I could not even tell her that she had a son, and this seemed inhumane to me. I expressed my concerns to the blonde agent, who had followed me out of the delivery room, as I transferred the baby into a wheelable cot waiting just outside for exactly that purpose. She assured me that it was all necessary for “security reasons” - she told me if the mother could in any way identify the baby, it would put him at risk. I could not imagine how this could be true - after all, she couldn’t have been anything but a maximum-security prisoner - but from the clench in the agent’s jaw, I deduced it unwise to argue._

_She followed me down the hall as I took the baby to the nursery, where he was cleaned, then examined only enough to confirm health. I was told the remaining tests would be conducted at another hospital, and that I was to accompany him and the agent on the ambulance ride over. I became even more concerned over who the mother was - she was apparently so dangerous her son could not be cared for in the same hospital - but no one would tell me. The baby slept during the ambulance ride, soothed by the rumbling of the engine, and I have to admit, he was very cute. I’ve seen many babies in my time as a labor and delivery nurse, and not all babies come out cute - it’s no meaningless compliment._

_Once we arrived at the other hospital - which was over an hour away - another nurse joined us to take him to the nursery. A tall, scruffy man with fluffy brown hair was waiting for us there, dressed in a soft-looking blue cardigan and slacks. He stood very stiffly as he watched us approach. The blonde agent immediately went over to him, motioning for the other nurse and I to wait. She spoke to him in a low voice, and his gaze did not waver from where it rested on the baby’s cot._

_“Spencer,” she said, and I realized that man was the father (how that baby came to be I still cannot imagine - though appearances can be deceiving, I am certain that man had a gentle soul. Having relations with a maximum-security prisoner is not something I’d ever imagine him doing)._

_The blonde agent - whom he appeared to be familiar with - placed a hand on his arm and asked softly, “do you want to meet him?” The man - Spencer - gave a barely-perceivable nod of his head, after which she began guiding him over to the baby._

_Many fathers are stunned to meet their children at first - I’ve witnessed a few faint in the delivery room - but I had seen none so shell-shocked as this man. He just stared at first, seemingly conflicted about the baby’s existence. Then, he raised a tentative finger to touch the baby’s tiny exposed foot. The baby blinked his eyes open and kicked his little legs, and this inspired the man to reach delicately into the cot to retrieve his son._

_He instinctively tucked the baby into the crook of his neck, cradling his head with a soft palm and kissing the crown of his downy-haired head. I heard him murmur, “Hi Ethan, I’m your dad,” to the baby - Ethan - and for a moment I forgot about the whole ordeal that led to that moment. It seemed to be the same for the blonde agent; it was only then that her face broke from its tightly-pinched complexion._

_I still do not know who the mother was - nor the father, for that matter, though from his familiarity with the blonde I presume he was also an agent - and I doubt I ever will. I do not know the circumstances of the baby’s conception, nor what necessitated all those security measures. But I do know that man - Spencer - is a good father, and I know Ethan is lucky to have him._

…

For the first few days it was just Ethan and I. JJ had, of course, offered to stay over and help me with him, but I wanted it to be just us two, at least for a little while. Despite everything I had read about infant care over the past few months since the prenatal paternity test confirmed my impending fatherhood, I could hardly make myself put him down. I knew it would make it much harder to eventually transition him to sleeping on his own, but he fit so perfectly on my chest, and from that position he would look up at me with his little doe eyes - I wanted to keep him like that forever, even if it meant I would never have a good night’s sleep again (and, really, my sleep was horrible in the months following prison anyway. Staying up with Ethan hardly made a difference). 

I had not expected to love him so immediately and so much. I knew that prolonged exposure to him, and my role as his caretaker, would eventually cause me to view him as my child 

(which I knew he was, it was just hard to connect myself to him when his conception and gestational period were so far removed from me. After everything that happened with Cat, I was not allowed to visit her in prison - not that I wanted to, except to check on the pregnancy - so I hadn’t seen him grow or felt his movements. There was the knowledge of a fetus and a few sonogram pictures, and it all seemed very unreal. Then, Emily called to tell me she was taking me to the hospital to wait for his arrival. From that point I had hours to reconcile with his birth, but it still felt like he suddenly appeared. That one minute he didn’t exist, and the next I had a newborn) 

and I had anticipated struggling to love him at first. Before Ethan, I hadn’t understood how women could raise children who were conceived due to sexual assault. In those months leading up to his arrival, thinking of him was almost equivalent to thinking about being assaulted - about the vague flashes of memory, yes, but more so about the knowledge that I had been violated like that. As soon as he kicked his tiny baby foot against my finger, it felt like none of that mattered. It didn’t go away; it’s not something that will ever go away completely. But all I felt in that moment was love - stronger than even my love for my mother - and it only grew as I cradled him to my chest. 

I know, intellectually, that it was from the rush of oxytocin flooding my system telling me to care for my offspring. But it was also so much more than that. Before Ethan I had, at least in part, always believed love and attachment to be a product of chemical reactions - dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, oxytocin, vasopressin: a series of neurotransmitters and action potentials eliciting a response. But holding him in my arms for the first time I was reminded of all the things in the world science can’t explain, and I truly understood how parents are so willing to do anything for their children. 

Ethan came from the worst time in my life, yet he was - and still is - easily the best part of me. It was such a strange situation to be in. Being assaulted and framed for murder, then sent to prison pending trial, having my mom kidnapped by a psychpath - those things had made my life so incredibly hard, and they continued to make my life hard after they were “over.” 

I had been back at work for a week when I was served with a court order from Cat’s lawyer to submit a DNA sample for a paternity test. It was then that I knew the baby was mine, not later when the results came back. Then, amidst juggling PTSD and work, I had to jump through hoops to get custody of the still-unborn baby - the father, if not married to the mother, has no legal rights to the child. The courts were immediately in favor of seizing the child from Cat, but not so sure of granting custody to me due to my recent incarceration, nevermind that I had since been exonerated. 

JJ and Emily testified as character witnesses on my behalf, as a godfather, and as an agent, respectively. In the end, it was decided I would be granted full parental custody upon birth as the biological father. Despite having not yet met him, nor even knowing he was a boy, I was so fearful of losing Ethan - hearing the judge rule in my favor was the greatest relief I had ever felt in my 35 years.

Though none of that went away when I took Ethan home, it faded into the background somewhat. In my moments of panic, I tucked him into my chest or tickled his soft little belly or admired his Palmar grasp reflex as he curled his itty-bitty fingers around mine. I busied myself with tending to his care, keeping up on all the latest research on infant physical and cognitive development and promoting health in babies. In promoting learning, too - when we were alone, I spoke to him almost exclusively in Russian because growing up bilingual has been shown to be beneficial to brain development in children. 

I took him to meet my mother in the Memory Care home when he was 6 weeks old, after calling ahead to make sure she was having a good day. She loved him immediately, held him and told me how much he looked like me. I’m not sure how her brain rationalized my having a baby, but it didn’t matter at all in that moment. He cried a little in her arms, but settled upon hearing my voice. It made me feel like a dad - having him respond to me that way - rather than just a father. 

My teammates cooed over him when I invited them over to meet him, and told me what a perfect baby I had made (pointedly ignoring the other half of his parentage). When I took him to JJ’s to meet Henry and Michael they loved him, too. It filled me with joy. 

I went back to work for two weeks - leaving Ethan in the care of a nanny I had hired after considerable research (and a semi-legal Garcia background check) - and traveled on exactly one case before deciding I couldn’t bear to be away from him for such long stretches of time. And besides, the job just hadn’t felt the same since being released from prison. Emily helped me find a new position teaching at the Academy, as well as inter-department consulting (mainly for the BAU teams, but also for Intelligence on occasion). The NSA jumped on the opportunity to try and recruit me once again, but I rejected the position - citing being the single parent of a sub-6-month-old. I did, however, agree to work with them for a consulting fee if they ever needed me for a short-term project. 

I spent most of my free time reading to Ethan and taking him for walks around the city, giving him lessons in all sorts of subjects. I also began attending a support group for both male and female survivors of sexual assault (in addition the occasional NA meeting) when Ethan was nearly 4 months old. 

The first week I attended I met a woman - (y/n). She had brought her baby - Amelia, I came to learn - with her, and that was actually what prompted me to speak with her. Ethan wasn’t with me; I had left him in Garcia’s care while I attended the group. We spoke a bit about our lives and our children, though nothing about either of our assaults. She invited me to a parent-and-me music class - apparently, she had been wanting to attend for a few weeks at that point, but had feared going on her own. 

I was surprised to enjoy interacting with other parents so much - beyond JJ, whose boys were both significantly older than Ethan. We all sat on the floor together with our kids - for the most part all under 12-months - and shook rattles and tambourines. The “instructor” played a melody on the piano and led us all in a cute little song, and Amelia accidentally smacked Ethan with her rattle in her excitement. It was really more of a light tap than anything - it didn’t make Ethan cry - but it was so endearing (y/n) and I both burst into laughter, and so did the other moms and dads who’d seen. I realized I hadn’t laughed like that in well over a year; I smiled at Ethan almost constantly, but that kind of unstoppable laughter had at some point become foreign to me. 

I started going to the music class every week with (y/n), and we tried other parent-and-me classes together with Ethan and Amelia when we had time - it wasn’t too hard since I had transitioned to a desk job, and we both only worked weekdays. We tried swimming (which Amelia loved, but Ethan hated), dance (which involved more ribbons and bubbles than actual dancing), then baby gymnastics once the kids were a bit older (which they both loved, but was nixed after one only one class because it induced too much parental anxiety from both (y/n) and I).

We didn’t speak about what happened to us when we were doing those fun things with our kids - it would have felt like an invasion, like somehow tainting the perfect children that had come out of it. But both of us ended up speaking in the group after a while. I found it difficult to tell my story since it was so insane, for lack of a better word. I honestly worried the other group members wouldn’t believe me. Most of the recurring attendees were women, and most hadn’t had a child come out of it (though a few spoke about taking the morning-after pill, or contracting an STD, or having an abortion. I guess I was lucky in that sense - Ethan wasn’t inside of me, it wasn’t my choice. I can’t imagine having to make that impossible choice.)

I heard (y/n)’s story 5 weeks after that first meeting I attended. She didn’t have Amelia with her (she didn’t always, but I think that time it was because she knew she wanted to speak, and she didn’t want Amelia to hear even though she was still too little to understand - just 3 weeks older than Ethan). 

(y/n) spoke about a work party, about accepting a drink from a male coworker, about how she started to feel more inebriated than she should have. She didn’t remember the actual assault, didn’t even realize it had happened until much later. He knew where she lived, dug through her purse for the key while she was out of commission. He wasn’t rough with her and cleaned her up after. She knew this because she woke up in her own apartment, in her own bed, and with no tell-tale sticky residue or discomfort aside from the hangover. 

She wasn’t sexually active at the time, so even when she missed her period she didn’t think about pregnancy. It was actually the lack of a period, along with the nausea and weight gain, that drove her to visit her doctor - she thought something was seriously wrong with her. When the doctor told her she was pregnant and referred her to an OB/GYN - and congratulated her on her pregnancy - she was confused, at first, didn’t believe it. When she made it to the OB/GYN a little over a week later - calling in sick to work to make the appointment - all she could say was that it was impossible, that she hadn’t been sexually active in over a year. She spoke about the way the OB/GYN looked at her - with sadness, as if she guessed what had happened - though she didn’t notice it at the time. 

Her pregnancy was dated at 15 weeks - _the fetus already looked like a baby on the sonogram_ , she said, _after I realized what had happened I seriously considered abortion. I scheduled it and everything. But in Virginia, as I’m sure many of you know, you have to have an ultrasound and attend an anti-abortion “counseling” session 24 hours before. I couldn’t - I could tell that the fetus had grown, on the scan. I panicked, I couldn’t do it. And I guess that’s what those laws are for, right? To guilt women into not doing it._

(y/n) spoke about the 5 days it took her to remember that morning, waking up without knowing how she got home. _I just knew_ , she said, and _I knew who did it too. I won’t say his name, I don’t want him to have anything to do with Amelia, but he was always making comments at me at work. It was disgusting._

She spoke about how she couldn’t make herself go back to work after that, how she quit _effective immediately_ even though she knew it would make it harder to find another job. How she couldn’t get anyone to hire her due to her visible pregnancy. How she lied to her parents that she was fired because she knew they would try to blame it all on her, about having to beg to move back in with them when her savings started to get low.

She talked about being afraid of not loving her baby, about how conflicted she felt as the fetus grew. It was then that I knew I would one day tell my story to the group - although perhaps a somewhat redacted version. Our stories were similar in many ways, though very different in others. But what really got to me was that this woman I could plainly see loved her daughter to the ends of the Earth had had the same fears as me - the same fears about being unable to love her child. 

That day came 3 weeks later. I spoke in vague terms because Cat’s case still hadn’t been closed - she was being considered for the death penalty since she was no longer pregnant. I said that I used to work in law enforcement, that a woman I put away orchestrated drugging me and framing me for murder, that once I got out of prison and talked to her, she told me about the baby, about taking a sample from me while I was high, something I barely had any memory of. 

I talked about fighting the courts for custody, about how afraid I was they wouldn’t rule in my favor. I talked about how disconnected I felt from my baby because all I had were a few sonogram pictures, about how afraid I was the mother would try to hurt the baby somehow. 

I hadn’t talked about it before, and I finally understood what (y/n) had told me a few days after she’d spoken, _it felt like letting go, in a good way._

…

(y/n) became my best friend (though I loved my friends from the BAU no less and still went out with them as often as any single parent of a small child can, everything that happened - that they had seen happen to me - made it harder to connect to them). We watched Ethan and Amelia graduate from baby to toddler classes - watched them babble, then talk, then converse in little toddler-sentences. We took them to the zoo, to the Smithsonian, star gazing. We read to them in the library and made sure they always thought learning was something fun. 

Three days after Amelia’s third birthday, (y/n) threw a joint birthday party for her and Ethan. Little kids from different parent-and-me classes ran around the feet of their parents and my BAU family and her friends from work. There were cupcakes and little sticky hands covered in frosting. Ethan insisted on sitting in (y/n)’s lap as we decorated them, but Amelia insisted on sitting in mine, so. 

One of the other little boys said _Ethan, your mommy is really nice_ , and I was about to jump in to correct him when Ethan said _I know_ , as if he’d never considered anything else.

(y/n) was looking at him with the love of a mother in her eyes. I reached over to grasp her hand, and at the same time she leaned over to give me a quick kiss, as if we had been doing it all along. What surprised me the most is that none of the other adults reacted, not even my former-team. I guess they had assumed we were already together. 

I married her two years later; we filed for adoption of each other’s children.

But really, _they were both of ours all along._


End file.
